Magazine editors love white! Paper is white, so anything on a white background will blend seemlessly into the contents. There is nothing more versatile than a simple object or scene surrounded by some white space.
For stock photographers it is a significant effort to shoot perfect pictures of isolated objects. They need expensive equipment and much experience in setting up the studio lights. Some photographers try to avoid this tedious work and try to isolate their objects with Photoshop. But this is not easy either. Badly done Photoshop isolations are daily fare for reviewrs on microstock sites.
Rendered 3D computer graphics has got a defintive advantage over photography here. You have to setup your basic white scene only once, and then you can put anything into it you want. Possibilities are virtually unlimited, but 3D designers have a different problem to solve: If you want to render something, you obviously need a model.
Depending on your skills and personal preferences, you can either model the object yourself or try to get hold of a model that somebody else designed. There are countless websites where you can buy commercial models, but there are also plenty of possibilities to get free models that can even be legally used in a commerial environment.
But as nice and useful isolated objects may be, there are so many other things that can be done with computer graphics, that it would be a shame just to rely on them. I think most photographers couldn’t imagine just to shoot isolated objects and nothing else. And as far as I am concerned, I feel much the same. I regard the isolations as bread and butter work, but it’s always better to have some ham or jam with it!
